Elite Lawyer Brain: An apparently terminal condition
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Stephen Gillers is probably the best known expert on legal ethics in the American academy (he has taught and written about the subject at NYU for 45 years). So when Politico was looking for somebody to comment on the ethics of “somebody” flying a Stop the Steal flag in front of [checks notes] Samuel Alito’s house, where Samuel Alito lives, it reached out to Gillers, and got this:
It remains unclear whether Alito was aware of the inverted flag at the time or its links to Trump supporters, said Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethics expert at New York University School of Law. “I don’t believe Alito knew the flag was flying upside down or if he did know, I find it hard to believe that he knew the relationship to “‘Stop the Steal,’” he said in an email.
Maybe they should have consulted an expert on evidence because:
(1) Alito has not denied that he was aware of the situation, which can be pretty much 100% certain he would have denied if hadn’t been aware of it, such as for example if he had just happened to be in Nepal or a coma that week, as opposed to living at the house he lives in, where the flag was being flown. So I wouldn’t say this is “unclear” in the slightest, and it’s just weird to report it as being unclear, and much, much weirder for Stephen Gillers to be literally incredulous at the suggestion that Alito knew about the flag.
(2) Alito’s explanation — that it was his wife who flew the flag upside down to protest, in response to a neighbor’s anti-Trump protest sign (the sign was apparently “Fuck Trump”) — but he had nothing to do with, and in any event it wasn’t a Stop the Steal gesture of solidarity, is a laughably obvious lie. I mean who actually believes that a SCOTUS justice’s wife is going to put up a giant Stop the Steal symbol without mentioning it to her husband, and without knowing what it means, and then maybe discussing whether a little light sedition is a good idea all things considered?
The answer, obviously, is Stephen Gillers, who like so many lifetime adherents to various myths about the nature of the Supreme Court as well as various other political and legal realitties, is firmly ensconced in a dream world that bears increasingly little relation to the one we all unfortunately inhabit at the moment.